ROADS get busier all the time. It sounds like an obvious truth. Month on month, year on year, the traffic builds relentlessly.

Yet, one once major trunk road in south Essex has reversed the tendency and gone to sleep.

Until 2002, the A130 between Battlesbridge and Howe Green was one of the busiest trunk routes in Essex. Then the first stage of the A130 bypass opened.

Overnight, traffic rates on the old road dropped by 80 per cent.

The figure is precise. A number of residents stood by the road and counted, before and after. They observed the A130 turn into a ghost road in front of their eyes.

As the main artery between Chelmsford and Southend and south-east Essex and, the A130 was an 18th-century turnpike road, built for horses and carts, trying to do a 21st century job.

It was widened into a dual-carriageway for some of its length, but that only made the remaining bottlenecks worse.

Essex county councillor Ron Bass described this road as "a stranglehold on the county". It had to be superannuated, and it was.

The new highway was more than just a traffic improvement scheme, however. The new super-highway grabbed and concreted over a stretch of greenfield, but it also restored a parallel strip of land to rural peace.

Announcing the project, Essex County Council declared: "We will give the villages along the original A130 back to the people who live in them".

Ron Fallows, chairman of Rettendon Parish Council, says this promise has been kept. "It is all gain," he says. "I've not talked to anyone who thinks otherwise.

"I would say it has improved the social life of the village. We are a spread-out community. You used to think twice before going from one part of the village to another, because of the traffic."

Ron adds the new road has been "an absolute treasure" from a parental point of view as "the school run is no longer a nightmare".

Green is now the colour of the old A130. It is an eco action zone. At the Bell pub interchange, a former six-lane stretch of highway has been narrowed back to where it started in 1760, a two-lane road.

The rest of the tarmac has been planted over with grass, except for one strip which has been left as a cycle and rambling route.

The green strategy is obvious from the moment you enter the old road. Its mouth, where it is one of 14 different lanes discharging on to Rettendon turnpike roundabout, has also been narrowed. Before the changes, the approach to the junction was arrow straight in an attempt to reduce the accident toll that blighted this spot.

Now it has been turned into a traffic-calming meander. The curve imposes an automatic speed restriction as you navigate into the road, and signals that you are entering an old, slow country route, where cars are second-class citizens.

Indeed, you immediately encounter road conditions which haven't been experienced on major highways in southern England since the early 1930s.

At mid-afternoon on a Monday, a car journeying the five miles of the ghost road passed just 28 vehicles coming in the opposite direction.

This once heaving road has turned into a backwater. This impression is reinforced by the sight of the boarded-up Wheatsheaf tavern, once a thriving family roadside pub.

A nearby resident, Rick Wood, from Bicknacre, recalls: "This was probably the busiest pub for miles around. It had a fire engine in the garden which was a big magnet for kids. It was like a beehive on a summer's day."

Another roadside pub, the Bell, has actually increased trade since the changes.

Its landlord, Simon Galley, says: "People are making the effort to come out here to enjoy a country pub, rather than stopping at a roadside one."